David Crane

United States · Born 1954 · Activision · Game Designer, Programmer

The Atari programmer who co-founded Activision and designed Pitfall!, one of the defining games of the Atari 2600, before making Ghostbusters and A Boy and His Blob.

David Crane was born in 1954 in Nappanee, Indiana, earned an electrical engineering degree from the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix and worked on integrated circuits at National Semiconductor before joining Atari in 1977, where he programmed Atari VCS games including Outlaw and Canyon Bomber. Games by Crane and a handful of colleagues made up $60 million of Atari's $100 million in 1978 cartridge sales. In 1979 Crane and Alan Miller left with other Atari colleagues to co-found Activision, the first independent publisher of games for the console. His Activision games included Dragster and Fishing Derby (1980), Freeway (1981) and Grand Prix, and above all Pitfall! (1982), the jungle adventure that became one of the company's biggest sellers. Pitfall II: Lost Caverns and The Activision Decathlon followed, and Ghostbusters (1984), finished in about six weeks, was ported to more systems than any other Activision game. Crane left Activision in 1987 and joined Garry Kitchen's Absolute Entertainment, where he made A Boy and His Blob (1989), and later co-founded Skyworks Technologies with Kitchen. In 2010 he was the first recipient of the AIAS Pioneer Award.